I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have been
delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour
consulting some necessary book because I shrank from lifting the
heavy volumes of the catalogue; and yet to save money for my
afternoon coffee and roll I often walked the whole way home to
Bedford Park. I was compiling, for a series of shilling books, an
anthology of Irish fairy stories and, for an American publisher, a
two volume selection from the Irish novelists that would be
somewhat dearer. I was not well paid, for each book cost me more
than three months' reading; and I was paid for the first some
twelve pounds, ('O Mr. E...' said publisher to editor, 'you must
never again pay so much') and for the second, twenty; but I did
not think myself badly paid, for I had chosen the work for my own
purposes.

Though I went to Sligo every summer, I was compelled to live out of
Ireland the greater part of every year and was but keeping my mind
upon what I knew must be the subject matter of my poetry. I believed
that if Morris had set his stories amid the scenery of his own Wales
(for I knew him to be of Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that
he had spent his childhood there) that if Shelley had nailed his
Prometheus or some equal symbol upon some Welsh or Scottish rock,
their art had entered more intimately, more microscopically, as it
were, into our thought, and had given perhaps to modern poetry a
breadth and stability like that of ancient poetry. The statues of
Mausolus and Artemisia at the British Museum, private, half animal,
half divine figures, all unlike the Grecian athletes and Egyptian
kings in their near neighbourhood, that stand in the middle of the